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“Mother” Teresa ’

The pompous and self-congratulatory pageantry over the canonization of Mother Teresa (Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu), positively wallowing in credulity, has dominated TV news and social media all week. Sainthood is dependent on supposedly proving that Bojaxhiu was involved in posthumous “miracles.” How ironic the Church requires superstitious claims to supposedly be backed up by “scientific evidence” before it will accept their validity.

My primary objection to the fawning adulation Bojaxhiu received during her lifetime and after her death is rooted in her opportunistic use of almost every public occasion — notably including her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize — to attack women’s rights. She not only went after abortion, but, in

As the Vatican conferred sainthood on Mother Teresa, an organisation promoting scientific thinking on Sunday ridiculed Indian politicians for attending the canonisation ceremony that “promoted superstition” and asked them to distribute her pictures instead of opening hospitals.

The city-based Science and Rationalists’ Association of India (SRAI), on the day held a meet opposing Teresa’s canonisation at the Vatican City which was attended by host of leaders from across the globe including Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

“By attending the canonisation ceremony our leaders have certified that they believe in miracles and hocus-pocus. So now, instead of spending tax payers money on hospitals,

It quotes some people who have found MT’s putative saintliness not all that generous or useful.

In Calcutta, one meets many doubters.

For example, Samity, a man of around 30 with no teeth, who lives in the slums. He is one of the “poorest of the poor” to whom Mother Teresa was supposed to have dedicated her life. With a plastic bag in hand, he stands in a kilometre long queue in Calcutta’s Park Street. The poor wait patiently, until the helpers shovel some rice and lentils into their bags. But Samity does not get his grub

Few people are as closely identified with a city as Mother Teresa is with Kolkata, the onetime colonial Indian capital where the Albanian nun garnered worldwide admiration for her work with the poor, infirm and outcast.

…

Many in Kolkata revere her for the half-century of service that earned her a Nobel Peace Prize and the moniker “saint of the gutters.” The Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded in 1950, sheltered tens of thousands of leprosy victims, sidewalk-dwellers, tuberculosis patients, orphans and the disabled at 19 homes across the city, and now has branches in 150 countries.

When I visited the Hospice for the Destitute and Dying in Kalighat (a district of Calcutta), Sister Nirmala – Teresa’s successor – told me that my marriage to a “Hindu” was a “big problem” and she looked quite upset about it (I think she assumed that I am Christian, which I am not). Nirmala stated that my marriage would never work and she wanted to have a word with me. I walked out. She was obviously a Christian chauvinist bigot, ie a fascist.

Teresa’s libelling of Calcutta has human costs. Calcutta is a wonderful city with the kindest, most intelligent

Over hundreds of hours of research, much of it cataloged in a book he published in 2003, Dr. Chatterjee said he found a “cult of suffering” in homes run by Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, with children tied to beds and little to comfort dying patients but aspirin.

He and others said that Mother Teresa took her adherence to frugality and simplicity in her work to extremes, allowing practices like the reuse of hypodermic needles and tolerating primitive facilities that required patients to defecate in front of one another.

Again – like the nonsense about suffering as some kind of virtue-pump – a self-regarding performance of saintliness that … Read the rest

Most Christians think that God can allow us to suffer if the suffering is redemptive. I think that too. And that looks like all she is saying, [is] that God can heal our hearts through some kinds of suffering and that we can accept it as such.

So Anjezë Bojaxhiu aka “Mother” Teresa is going to be “canonized” tomorrow – that is, magically transformed (19 years after her death) into a “saint”…there’s so much bullshit in this story I’m going to run out of scare-quotes. The pope is going to say stuff and that will mean she’s now a saint, which is to say, a person of great holiness. What’s holiness? Ah that’s the great question, isn’t it. Is it religious fanaticism or is it kindness and compassion?

In her case, of course, it’s the first and not at all the second.

Pilgrims will venerate her relics and have the opportunity to buy 1.5m commemorative 95c postage stamps, released on Friday, that celebrate her “great strength, simplicity

dormitory held about 30 beds rammed in so close that there was hardly a breath of air between the bare metal frames. Apart from shrines and salutations to “Our Great Mother”, the white walls were bare. The torch swept across the faces of children sleeping, screaming, laughing and sobbing, finally resting on the hunched figure of a boy in a white vest. Distressed, he rocked back and forth, his ankle tethered to his cot like a goat in a farmyard. This was the Daya Dan orphanage for children aged six months to 12 years, one of Mother Teresa’s flagship homes in Kolkata.

I worked as a volunteer in one of Mother Teresa’s homes in Calcutta, India for a period of two months at the end of 2008. It was during this time that I was shocked to discover the horrific and negligent manner in which this charity operates and the direct contradiction of the public’s general understanding of their work.

After further investigation and research, I realized that all of the events I had witnessed amounted to nothing more than a systematic human rights violation and a financial scam of monumental and criminal proportions.

Workers washing needles under tap water only to be reused again. Medicine and other vital items being store for months on end, expiring and eventually still applied sporadically … Read the rest